At last they could see the smoke through the trees and finally reached a point where they could make out the hazy outlines of the camp. It was the crudest kind of an outfit. A small portable mill sat out in the open without the protection of even so much as a shed-roof, and scattered about it were three miserable cabins—mere board shacks. Only one little pile of lumber was in sight. They sat for a few minutes and gazed at it in silence.
“Well,” Scott remarked, “there she is. The next question is, how are we going to get close enough to identify our lumber without getting shot?”
Murphy’s Irish blood was boiling. He had been looking for those timber thieves for two years, and now that they were in sight he was for stalking in on them and arresting them.
“Rush ’em!” he exclaimed angrily. “Rush right in on them. Take them by surprise and we can arrest the whole outfit easy.”
“It might be possible, all right,” Scott replied, weighing the possibilities, “but it seems to me doubtful. We have only one gun. There are six of those fellows in sight and probably more in the cabins. If they were all in one bunch we might stand a show, but while we were covering the ones there at the mill it would be a cinch for any one in the cabin to pot us.”
Murphy had to admit the truth of that, but he was in favor of trying it anyway. “What are you going to do then?” he asked peevishly when Scott shook his head in disapproval of the scheme. “Not going to run home and let them get away?”
“No reason why they should run away when they do not know that we have found them. But I was not thinking of running away. My plan is to reconnoiter the place as closely as we can, find out how many men there are here, identify our logs, and possibly close in on them at night. We haven’t any warrant for them, and probably they are not the fellows who are stealing the stuff. They are only hired men and if we arrest them the real thieves who are engineering the job at a safe distance may get wind of it and get away. No, I think we better just hang around here and keep out of sight till we can find out who is running this outfit. Then we can nail him and we’ll have something worth while.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” Murphy admitted, cooling off a little. “It would be too bad to lose the main guy after all. Best thing we can do is to take to the brush here and wait till dark. Can’t be over half an hour now.”
They tore their eyes from the mill and turned to examine the near-by brush for a good hiding place. “There is a good thick clump over there,” Scott said, pointing to a clump a little way ahead of them, “where we can hide the bateau and ourselves, too. It’s——”
The words died on his lips and his eyes almost popped out of his head. In that very clump of brush there were a pair of big eyes as round as his own and fixed full upon him. Blue, frightened eyes they were, and they no sooner found that they were observed than they disappeared like a flash. Scott shot the bateau forward to have a close look and was just in time to see a very small boy minus any clothes at all streaking it through the brush toward the camp as though his life depended on it—and he probably thought that it did. He had evidently been swimming in the bayou and had been cut off from his clothes by their approach.